On a winter’s morning in 2011, I stood standing on a beach, yelling furiously at these two expert kayakers.
That morning, I had decided to learn to paddle an ocean ski, and they agreed to teach me.
Now, these things are notoriously “tippy,” and the model I was in was particularly narrow…
I had gone out with these guys about an hour prior, they guided me around a coastal headland (somehow I stayed upright until that point), before promptly ditching me and disappearing out of sight to the south.
I tried to keep up, but once we cleared the headland, the rebounding swell off the cliffs knocked me in the water over and over again.
The swell was pretty big, and for a while there I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it back.
Somehow I got through the ordeal, completely exhausted, and we regrouped on the beach. I was pretty furious with them, and the worst part was, they just kept laughing.
Interestingly, from that point on, I could paddle: still water, chop, swell, upwind, downwind, it was all there.
Apparently this stressful ordeal had hammered it into my thick and waterlogged skull and really helped the learning process.
Difficult learning environments aren’t fun. Early on, progress is slower, and people get frustrated. We much prefer a hack, template or a cheat-sheet.
The truth is, if something is coming too easily, if there are too many hints, chances are change isn’t being made.
Often the more frustrating or emotionally taxing it is in the short run, the more powerful it is in the long run.
(Check out David Epstein’s book “Range” for more on difficult learning environments)
